Help Save my PB!

S

Steve-VST

Registered
Greetings,

I just came back after taking an hour and a half break from my PowerBook 17" 1.33. Prior to the break taking, I ran a System Upgrade. There were four things to download/install, all of which I can't remember. I do know that "Battery Update" and "10.3.2 Upgrade" were in there. I was running Panther.1. It froze up, so I forced the shutdown (held down the power button).

Which brings me to my return. It was stuck on the boot screen (with the gray Apple logo and spinning wheel).

I've tried restarting it, same thing happens. I found my original restore CD for 10.2.8, and when I put it in, it won't automatically boot. I've tried holding down Option+Command+Shift+Delete along with holding down "C". Both fail to work. C fails altogether, while the Option+Command+etc. idea takes me to a blue folder icon with the Finder logo flashing in rotation with a question mark.

I have no idea what to do now. While I don't want to lose my 70 GB worth of saved documents and files, if this is my only option, then so be it -- the problem is I can't even boot from the restore CD!

If you have any suggestions, they would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Steve
 
O.K. Then lets try booting into single user mode. When starting up the powerbook hold down command+s. This will boot without the GUI. When all command stuff goes by and the command line comes showing the # prompt.

1) type "fsck -f" ->without the quotes ( -f for Panther .. -y for Jaguar)
2) look to see if any errors come up. If there are errors, the system will try to fix them. If it can't fix them, rerun the command until the command line spits out everything is O.K.
3) then type "reboot" (without the quotes)

If this doesn't help then a disk utility may be in order.
 
Hello Steve,

First welcome to MacOSX.com. Hope that you find it good here.

You are not the first to experience this problem, and I suspect you will not be the last. I have first hand experience of this problem as my colleague also had the problem that you describe and it took us all night to fix it.

But not to worry, help is at hand.

The most important thing here is to rescue your files. Unfortunately, this is harder than it sounds. My colleague and I tried everything, boot up from the CD, repair the permissions, repair the disk, nothing worked... execpt one thing.

Sorry to say, you will another Firewire Macintosh and a firewire cable.

Here's what to do:

1. Shut down your PowerBook. Make sure Mac 2 is on.
2. Connect the PowerBook to Mac 2 via the Firewire cable.
3. Power up the PowerBook and press and hold 'T'
4. This turns the PowerBook in to an external Firewire hard drive, and an icon for it will appear on Mac 2. You then use Mac 2 to transfer the files off the PowerBook that you want to save. Forget the System Folder and Applications as these can be restored.

This is what we did and it worked a treat. My colleague was saved from a heart attack and saved his 2 years worths of Mp3's and Photos :)

Ok, once you have saved your files, there are a few avenues that you can do to get the machine up and running.

The first thing is that you want to boot up off a CD.

Try theses:

1. Shut down and Power Up, insert the CD and press 'C'

2. Shut down and Power Up, insert the CD and press 'Option' / 'Alt'

Either one of these methods should work.

I notice that you are using Panther, so use the Panther Disc 1 and not the Restore CD that came with the machine.

If you do boot up with the CD, then there are a few options for you:

1. Try and repair the disk. Use the Disk Utility feature on the Panther CD to repair the hard disk. From experience, this will not work.

2. A quick win solution is just to Erase the Hard Disk and start again. This is what my colleague and I did, couldn't be arsed to muck around with it.

There is a another way that you might want to try if you can't get to Boot Up off the CD, but again, it requires another Mac with Firewire port.

1. Turn the PowerBook into a Firewire hard disk, method id above.
2. Insert the Panther Disc 1 into Mac 2 and double click Install.
3. This should restart Mac 2. Make sure you press 'T' on the PowerBook so the computer will acknowledge that the PowerBook is a external hard disk.
4. Go through the Install process and select the PowerBook to install on.
5. Continue as normal.


I have describe numerous methods to rescue your PowerBook, but if nothing works, you better ring Applecare and get them to sort it out.

Hope that I was some help.
 
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